Slightly early weeknotes! It’s been a much better week at work - my remote colleagues were in the office and they’re all fine human beings that I enjoy spending time with. I’ve been working for the last couple of weeks on a pretty technical feature with little opportunity to collaborate with others in the company. I’m hoping my next project will have more of a social aspect. I’m also getting into the swing of things a bit. Still working on forming the right habits in this AI-assisted world.

Commuting has been so much easier too - I even look forward to the early morning set-offs. A chance to wake up and get some air before the day starts. Although I haven’t had to deal with inclement weather yet. It’s been raining today.

Laundry is a thing - for so long I’ve been able to do two loads a week on fixed days. Now, with work clothes, it’s gone up to around 2.2 loads. This is a factoring challenge. I’m not sure I can wait to do an extra load every five weeks and I like having fixed laundry days - I have no tumble dryer so it takes a while for things to dry. I will attempt to cope through applied maths and advanced adulting.

I started playing this week with a slightly crazy idea I had a decade ago. I remember talking about it at the London Ruby Users Group to a sea of blank stares. The idea, briefly, is a tool that takes a project repository and rewrites the commit history to present an idealised and simpler story of a project’s evolution. At the time it was a reaction to working in a place that put process over outcome. I wondered what value is there in meticulously maintaining a history full of dead ends? What would the history look like if you had known exactly what to write from the start and directly implemented it? The project is called hindsight and I’ve been using it to make hindsight-ed histories of slop, liquid, mustache and sinatra. I think there’s value in it, but it’s not quite there yet. I’m toying with introducing LLM-written commit messages.

Grab-bag

  • “Robot” is a social construct: why your dishwasher is not a robot. “In short, a machine is a robot when it makes us sit with uncomfortable truths about ourselves.”
  • Who needs thought? from Chris Dillow. “…the response to the rise of the far-right has not been a vigorous assertion of liberal values - the cold warriors’ love of freedom and the open society was insincere - but a kowtowing to irrationalism and an appeasement of ’legitimate concerns’”.
  • Motion E02 from Paul Battley. “Given the choice between a left-wing party gaining power and implicit support of genocide, there’s no contest for them.” As the great one said, it’s not easy bein’ green.
  • I remain horrified at the path the US is on. Less than a month to the mid-terms and what with the Republicans fully white nationalist and the never-Trumper takeover of the Democrats, it doesn’t bode well for anyone squeezed on the liberal left. Still, I enjoyed this attack ad from James Talarico, who may well be on track to win a Democratic senate seat in Texas.